Ridley Scott, Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender were in London earlier this week to promote their new movie Prometheus.
A handful of media, including us here at FemaleFirst, were treated to some new footage of the sci-fi flick before chatting to the director and the stars about the film.
Ridley Scott talks about where the idea for the movie came from while Theron, Rapace and Fassbender discuss their characters and how they change throughout the movie.
- Chair Chris Hewitt: Ridley you had an idea for a prequel to ‘Alien’ based around the Space Jockey for a long, long time but at what point did that coalesce into something solid, into this?
Ridley Scott: Well, I watched the three subsequent ‘Aliens’ being made, which were all jolly good in some form or other. Does that sound competitive? Because I’m really competitive! So I thought the franchise was fundamentally used up. How long ago was the last ‘Alien’?
- Chair: ‘Alien Resurrection’ was 1997.
RS: 1997, so I must have thought about it for three or four years and thought in all of the films nobody had asked a very simple question which was - who is the big guy in the chair, who was fondly after ‘Alien’ called The Space Jockey.
I don’t know how the hell he got that name; there was this big boned creature who seemed to be nine feet tall sitting in this chair and I went in to Fox with four questions. Who are they? Why are they there? Why that cargo and where were they going or had they in fact had a forced landing? And so in fact it was a study of a pilot and Tom Rothman [co-chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment] said, ‘That sounds good to me’.
And so off I went with two writers, John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof and we came up with the screenplay, the draft. It’s interesting when you start off with an interesting idea like that and you don’t know whether it’s going to be a prequel or a sequel, it gradually adjusted itself into much larger questions and therefore now the actual connection to the original ‘Alien’ is barely in its DNA.
You kind of get it in the last seven minutes or so. What you saw here was a montage of what comes out of the film, just to give you a taste of what’s to come, so some of it felt a bit disjointed but you may have caught a bit of it, but there is a little bit of it right at the end that gives you a connection. That’s about it.
- Chair: But there are Easter Eggs in the film, I don’t know if anyone saw the planet is LV-223, I believe and the planet in ‘Alien’ is LV-426. Was it fun putting those things in, layering those little references?
